Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails
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Product Description
Product Description
Business intelligence and real–time reporting mechanisms play a major role in any of today’s forward–looking business plans. With many of these solutions being moved to the Web, the popular Rails framework and its underlying Ruby language are playing a major role alongside web services in building the reporting solutions of tomorrow.
Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is the first book to comprehensively introduce this popular framework, guiding readers through a wide–ranging array of features. Note this isn’t a staid guide to generating traditional reports, but rather it shows you how the Ruby language and Rails framework can create truly compelling reporting services by plugging into popular third-party applications and services such as Google AdWords, UPS.com, iTunes, and SalesForce.com.
What you’ll learn
- Create reporting solutions for both the Web and the desktop.
- Integrate with powerful third–party retail solutions such as eBay, and Amazon.com in order to monitor your sales campaigns in real–time.
- Build an invoice reporting system using Rails and PayPal.
- Monitor your sales performance by taking advantage of SugarCRM’s web service offerings.
Who this book is for
Ruby and Rails developers seeking to create compelling business intelligence and reporting solutions using a wide variety of applications and services.
Table of Contents
- Data Access Fundamentals
- Calculating Statistics with Active Record
- Creating Graphs with Ruby
- Creating Reports on the Desktop
- Connecting Your Reports to the World
- Tracking Auctions with eBay
- Tracking Expenditures with PayPal
- Creating Sales Performance Reports with SugarCRM
- Investment Tracking with Fidelity
- Calculating Costs by Analyzing Apache Web Logs.
- Tracking the News with Google News
- Creating Reports with Ruby and Microsoft Office
- Tracking Your Ads with Google AdWords
About the Author
Berube is a Ruby developer, trainer, author, and speaker. He's used both Ruby and Ruby on Rails for several years, starting in 2003 when he became a Ruby advocate after he wrote about the language for Dr Dobb's Journal. Prior to this he worked professionally with PHP, Perl, C++, and Visual Basic.
His professional accomplishments include creating the Ruby on Rails engine for CoolRuby.Additionally, he has worked on several other Ruby projects, including the engine powering CyberKnowHow's BirdFluBreakingNews search engine, and he also created the Slueshi text adventure game system, a multiplayer text game engine written in Ruby.
David's journalism has been in print in over 65 countries, in magazines such as Linux Magazine, Dr Dobb's Journal, and PHP International Magazine. He's also taught college courses and spoken publicly on topics such as "MySQL and You" and "Making Money with Open Source Software."
He lives in New Hampshire and his hobbies include basketball, yo-yos, and sleep.
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Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful survey but doesn't get to the heart of the matter, 8 April 2008
By James Stewart - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)
Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader's time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there's not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics.
That's not a criticism of the book so much as a caution to potential readers. After a little time spent looking at ActiveRecord, particularly focussing on using its calculation methods to save processor time, David Berube provides a pretty thorough coverage of a variety of ways to present reports. A few options for delivering data as PDFs, through a GUI, or directly into office are offered and a straightforward walkthrough is provided for each. The Rails content is minimal, and while the sample code could do with some refactoring and there'd be a case for using something more lightweight like merb it does the job.
But I must confess to being a little disappointed that there wasn't more time spent on the data processing side of the equation. Having been building a lot of graphs lately and needing to write some new reporting code in the near future it was helpful to have some analysis of tools I might use, but I never felt like the book ever really dove into the complexities of reporting. There's space in a book of this sort for serious consideration of both data processing and of visualisation techniques, but neither is really offered. Each chapter simply answers a very tightly defined request rather than delving into the full problem domain, and that feels like a missed opportunity.
If you're evaluating output options for your ruby application's reporting layer, this may be a handy book to have. It'll provide you with a sense of what tools are appropriate for which problems and more detailed sample code than is easily found on the web. But if you're looking to really grapple with reporting and visualisation you might be better off seeking out a good SQL reference and some of Tufte's books.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A survey of the field in a short book, 5 Jun 2008
By Ted Roche "LAMP Developer" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)
In less than 300 pages, the author skims the field of reporting with Ruby on Rails. Not meant as an authoritative reference nor a tutorial on the Ruby language nor Rails framework, David points to useful utilities and gems that let the developer deliver analyzed, summarized, processed data in many formats. For a great many applications, in the view of the users, the reports ARE the application, so getting the right format and right data presentation are essential. David briefly touches on the database fundamentals and then dives right into a set of practical and easily-understood examples using common data (eBay, PayPal, SugarCRM) and demonstrates how to create output in the most demanded formats: web pages, PDFs, graphs, and the office formats. With a topic so broad and a book of moderate size, David trades depth for breadth and does a great job of pointing out many Rails idioms and useful 3rd party tools.
Disclaimer: David's an associate of mine and arranged for a review copy of the book.
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